The Writer's Poke

In their book A Year of Hitchcock, McDevitt and Juan suggest that this might be the film that first showcases Hitchcock working on all cylinders. And I would have to agree. The film has witty dialogue, and that might have been the most obvious addition that had been lacking in previous films.  When people talk about Hitchcock films, they often bring up his use of MacGuffins. In this film, for example, the "state secret" is important to the characters. It gives them reasons to do what they do, but it's never "revealed" what the secret is, or who wants it. And ultimately, it doesn't matter. As audience members, we are simply interested in following Hannay's (Robert Donat) journey -- his quest not only to stay alive, but to clear his name.  Mr. Memory (Wylie Watson), as it turns out, is the "microfilm." We assume that the secret might be hidden somewhere, in some place. When we see the opening of the film, we're probably not thinking much abou...

  McDevitt and Juan offer five pages of "their impressions" on this film in their book A Year of Hitchcock. Although it includes a picture of Peter Lorre, they don't mention anything he actually does in the movie. Later in the chapter, the only thing they say about Lorre is that he didn't know English and had to memorize his lines phonetically. And yes, I would say that for someone who can't speak English, he's impressive.  The problem with his part in this film, however, is that he simply has nothing to do. I am a huge Peter Lorre fan, and I like to watch his films. Unfortunately, he's in a few films, like this one, where he really doesn't have much to make him stand out. Lorre "stands out," of course, just by the way he looks and his presence on the screen. But damn it, that's not enough. His character needs something to do, too.  In the 1956 remake with Jimmy Stewart and Doris Day, Hitchcock streamlines the story and makes it easier to...

The "first" Hitchcock film. As I'm reading through the Truffaut/Hitchcock book, I'm reminded that Hitchcock saw film as a visual medium. Maybe that's an obvious idea, but his point was that later, film would sort of forget that, and scenes would develop around people just finding different places to talk.  I've definitely noticed this without ever putting it into words. It's probably why I don't like shows like Law and Order, for example, but when I think of other shows I do like, I can see how some of them are more "talk shows," so to speak, than shows fully utilizing the visual to drive a story. Why does that happen? Likely because it's easier to convey information through talking (and probably because it's cheaper?). For Hitchcock, he believed that the fewer title cards needed in a silent film, the better. The challenge was to convey everything the viewer needed to know through a look, or to find other visual ways to communicate th...

Roger Ebert did audio commentary for the DVDs of only six films: Casablanca (1942) Dark City (1998) Crumb (1994) Floating Weeds (1959) Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970) Citizen Kane (1941)  Why just those six? I'd be curious to know, especially because for 30 years, he used to go through movies frame by frame with students at the University of Colorado. I don't know how many of those sessions were recorded, if any.  Watching the typical "audio commentary" feature on a DVD isn't something I often do, usually because: I've just watched the movie, and I don't have the time or motivation to immediately watch it again with the commentary on. Unfortunately, I find that when I don't watch the commentary immediately after watching the movie, I don't.  So, when I finished re-watching the film this time, I immediately started watching the Ebert commentary. I watched about the first 25-30 minutes and found it to be excellent. The same DVD also has the Pet...

Farley Granger, previously in Rope (1948), is back again in another Hitchcock picture, this time as Guy, tennis player and aspiring politician.  He has a wife, but she's pregnant with another man's baby. She had asked Guy for a divorce, but apparently, she changes her mind. Did divorce laws work that way? Did both parties have to agree to divorce for it to be granted, and when she threatens to tell the world that the child is his, were there not paternity tests available to prove otherwise? None of this matters, because Bruno (Robert Walker) has carried out his end of the unagreed-to bargain, strangling Guy's wife. Guy had met Bruno on a train. He assumes it was an accidental meeting, but Bruno has clearly been following Guy and has planned the meeting. I don't know if Bruno just assumed that Guy would be eager to go for the "crisscross perfect murder plan" or if he cared.  Much is made of Bruno ending up with Guy's lighter -- not something that was part o...

This movie has the two iconic scenes -- Man being chased by crop duster plane, and couple being chased on the top of Mt. Rushmore. That probably is enough to give it at least 4 stars. What about the rest of the movie? Roger (Cary Grant) is just a typical New York dude. Somehow -- never explained in the movie -- the bad guys come to believe that he's someone else. That someone else is a Cold War undercover agent. Turns out this agent isn't even real.  By the way, the crop-dusting scene is supposed to take place in Indiana, just 90 minutes away from Chicago. It's a completely barren and flat landscape. No trees. I'm pretty sure none of Indiana actually looks like that. Maybe it could pass for parts of Kansas, but I'm not sure. In fact, the scene was shot in central California. Regardless, it's a cool scene. And about the femme fatal: The movie really makes us think about Eve's ethics (Eva Marie Saint). She knew she was sending Roger to his doom, but in her pos...

Seems like every Hitchcock film has at least someone that wants to murder someone else, often for vague reasons, and killers are all very cold and calculating about it. They all think they have the perfect plan. Even when they get caught, they remain cold and calculating, like it's all just a game that doesn't matter anyway,  In this edition of Murder by Hitchcock, Tony (Ray Milland) knows that his wife, Margot (Grace Kelly) no longer loves him and that she's been seeing another man, Mark (Robert Cummings). Mark happens to be a murder mystery writer, and so its jolly good fun to hear Tony ask Mark how he plans his murders for his novels. Mark makes the pithy comment that planning murders in novels and planning them in real life are two different things, because real-life murders never go as planned. Tony does seem like he's got everything planned out down to the last detail, but what he doesn't plan for is Margot's scissors. She has a weapon that helps her fight...

While we are confronted with a dead body and a possible manslaughter/murder/coverup, the quirkiness of the situation and how all of the characters respond to it make this film quite different from other Hitchcock films.  Is it a 5-star film on the level of other 5-star Hitchcock films? Man, that's a tough question. And I'm going to punt on that. I don't know if this film is as good as Vertigo or Psycho. Honestly, probably not, but regardless, I do find the character development, the acting, and the setting all top notch.  Who is Harry? He's a dead body. And the trouble is, the people involved can't seem to get rid of him. He's buried, unburied, and so on, "throughout the day." Although Harry isn't a local, and for a while seems to be a stranger that's just unfortunately been shot, we discover that he's not a stranger, and the cause of his death is more complicated.  At the end, I love when Jennifer (Shirley McLaine) explains to the doctor j...

So I'm not sure how much we're supposed to care or how much they think we're going to remember... but at the end of the first movie, Nancy (Heather Langenkamp) dies, right? And didn't they mention and confirm her death in part 2? Well, apparently not. Even if she "went crazy" at the end of the original movie, she must have gotten better quickly, because she's back front and center in part 3, as a gifted psychology graduate student. She's so amazing that she even gets a full-blown adult male psychiatrist to fall in love with her. It's a budding relationship that's never really explained or developed. But anyway, this movie does lowkey rock. At the beginning of the film, Nancy (Patricia Arquette) cranks up Dokken's "Into the Fire" in an effort to stay awake, and so we're already Rokken with Dokken, and all is right with the world. Even before anything happens, you can already tell the production value is ten times better than it...

Unlike the first movie, which has the novelty of casting Johnny Depp, as well as having some interesting special effects, I gotta say that this movie has nothing really going for it.  A new family moves into the old house. Five years have passed, and we're told that Nancy (Heather Langenkamp) had killed herself. In the insulting twist ending to the first film, that's not how I remember it, but no matter. Franchises like this will change little details, either out of laziness, or because changing the details suits their purposes in some way. This time a boy, Jesse (Mark Patton) has the bad dreams. His dad knows about the house's history, but even though his son is going crazy, he never thinks that the house and his son's condition are connected. In the first film, Freddy (Robert Englund) stays on the dream side, more or less. But the idea is established that he can, somehow, cross into the side of the living. He seemingly crosses over a lot in this sequel, but really, wh...

The previous two times I watched this one, I gave it 4 stars, but this time, after just re-watching the other three Jimmy Stewart Hitchcock movies, I'm giving it 2.5 stars.  For whatever reason, it just didn't wow me this time. Stewart and Doris Day (Ben and Jo) are put in the horrible position of having their child kidnapped. But most of the movie is about us waiting for his release. The beginning of the film even tells us that the big moment is when the cymbal player claps the cymbals.  Now it takes a while for us to learn all the plot details, but I never feel like for a second that the boy will be killed or otherwise harmed, and since he's always more or less safe, there's not the needed sense of real danger. Maybe that's it.  But beyond that, there's nothing really compelling about Ben and Jo. They're a pretty bland married couple. They're happy, fight once a month, and Jo wants another child - seems a little odd, considering their son must be 10 or...

I love stop animation. In fact, it might be my favorite type of film, and as one reviewer noted, it's just about the biggest FU to AI there is.  LAIKA has an incredible track record. Wildwood is its sixth film. The first five all were Oscar nominated for Best Animated Feature. For Wildwood, I would love to see it nominated for Best Picture, period. It's that good. Only three animated films -- Beauty and the Beast (1991), Up (2009), and Toy Story 3 (2010) have been nominated for Best Picture, and they all lost.  Let me just mention the other five LAIKA films. Coraline is probably my favorite of the first five, but I think Wildwood blows them all away: Coraline (2009) ParaNorman (2012) The Boxtrolls (2014) Kubo and the Two Strings (2016) Missing Link (2019) What makes Wildwood even better than the previous five LAIKA films? It's even more epic. It perfectly captures both the cityscape of Portland, and the natural environment of the Impassible Woods. Although I've only spe...

This is the third or fourth time I've watched Vertigo, and although I'm going to keep the 5-star rating, man... can we talk about the ending? Scottie (Jimmy Stewart) needs to go back to the tower to "put the past behind him," and to prove to himself that he can make it to the top. That's fair, but as for the rest of the ending -- what happens at the top of the tower -- it just feels abrupt and leaves a lot of loose ends. Maybe we can assume that a few things will happen, but we never know for sure. Will Scottie finally put the past behind him and settle down with Midge (Barbara Bel Geddes)? I'm guessing she'll still take him, even if she knows she's his consolation prize. And what about Gavin (Tom Helmore)? Can we assume that Scottie will track him down and bring him to justice? But what "proof" does he have that Gavin did anything? The necklace? Not much more, really. But let's think a little bit more about the "behind the scenes...

Murder brings them together. Lisa (Grace Kelly) and L.B. (Jimmy Stewart) have nothing in common. He's a daredevil photographer, and he wants to keep travelling all over the world to take pictures. She is a glamour girl, happy to stay grounded in her social class and city lifestyle. One wonders how they even met and how they ever started dated. Then again, at the end of the movie, we see that Miss Torso has a boyfriend/husband who doesn't look like he should be with her, so strange things happen in relationships. When we first see Lisa enter L.B.'s apartment, Hitchcock gives her three shots from three different angles before she kisses L.B. And why not? At the time, Hitchcock (and us) might be mesmerized by her beauty, but all L.B. can think about is what's happening across the courtyard in the apartment complex. It's weird. No one but L.B. notices anything. All these people live next to, below, and on top of one another, and yet, none of them know each other, and th...

From what I read, Hitchcock thought Rope was a failure, with the plot being ultimately "thin" and the "one continuous shot" featured in the movie as too gimmicky. After a very short 1948 run in theaters, Rope was more or less forgotten until 1984, the first time it went on VHS. It wouldn't go on DVD until 2001.  The "one continuous shot" is actually a series of ten shots. The "invisible cuts" are made by the camera, for example, going "dark" into a man's jacket and then coming back out at the beginning of the next shot. It's a pretty cool technique that isn't overly noticeable until you start looking for it, which you might when you realize that each shot is going for minutes without a cut or break.  Obviously, the film has a sort of "play" feel, as the entire movie takes place in one room of the apartment. We may look into the kitchen or down a hall, but we don't ever actually leave the main living room. I...

This movie is iconic. This movie is pretty bad. Both things can be true. As I scroll through some of the other reviews on Letterboxd, I quickly come to the conclusion that no one is reviewing/rating the movie on its merits. They're rating it from nostalgia, or they're saying that it somehow changed the face of slasher movies. Well, I'm just going to assess it like any other movie. I've watched it a few times, and every time it's bad, just in different ways.  I don't think the special effects are bad. I like them. When Freddy (Robert Englund) licks Nancy (Heather Langenkamp) through the phone, I laugh at how corny is looks, but it's still a cool effect.  What I guess I don't like about the film is never being able to tell when Nancy is dreaming and when she's awake. At some point, I just assume she's always dreaming, and then, when there's supposed to be some "unforeseen" twist, I yawn, because I already assumed that something would ...

With Saboteur, I mentioned that a little sound might have helped. Shadow of a Doubt opens with a waltz, and that waltz is later hummed by different members of the family. So we get sound right from the start of this film, and then a soundtrack, too, that captures the emotions of the characters. The sound helps. I did start to wonder if the plot was too simplistic. We more or less know who's guilty. We don't know from the start of what, but he's guilty. What we don't know, I guess, is what Charlie (Teresa Wright) will do about it. She's weak. First agreeing to help the Detective (Macdonald Carey). Then agreeing to help Uncle Charlie (Joseph Cotton). (Her mom/Uncle Charlie's sister comes across as weak, too. The men in the film aren't weak... just quirky and not necessarily all that smart.) Meanwhile, I like the banter between Charlie's dad (Henry Travers) and the neighbor (Hume Cronyn). They're always discussing the best way to kill each other without...

When I watched this the first time in 2017, I ended up giving it a 2 out 5-star rating. I didn't write down any notes to explain my rationale, and so as I was re-watching the film now, I found myself trying to piece together how I might have rated it so poorly then. This time around, I appreciated the set pieces, especially the State of Liberty ending. But the film had other "set pieces," and by that, I simply mean, Hitchcock clearly took some time to figure out how to best shoot the factory, the cabin in the woods, the dockyard, the dance floor, and so on. Good camera work. Good set up of scenes. Good lighting. Just a lot of "good stuff" that a 2-star film wouldn't have.  Did the movie lack anything, then? Well, it's a quiet film. When I think of Hitchcock, I think of the dramatic score. Try watching Psycho without the soundtrack. It wouldn't be nearly the same, right? I just wonder what a good musical score would add to Saboteur.  That might, in fa...

What a pleasant surprise. Robert (Rock Hudson) has exactly what he wants. Lisa (Gina Lollobrigida) is his September girl. Every September, he leaves Rome for his villa in the country, and he spends the whole month with Lisa. When the month is up, he says goodbye and goes back to Rome.  He's happy with that arrangement. I guess we're to assume that he thinks she's happy with that arrangement, too. Does he have other girls in Rome, or other girls for different months? Not that we know of. In his own way, he might be "faithful" to Lisa. But do they ever talk the other eleven months of the year? The last time Robert left for Rome, Lisa ended up meeting another man. It's July, and she's set to marry this other guy, but as luck would have it, Robert decides to go to his villa a couple months early. But how had Lisa been seeing this other guy for seven months without Robert ever knowing? This is when he learns the servant that takes care of his villa has started ...

The premise of this one: Samuel (Charles Coburn) is getting older, and he regrets that the love of his life got away. Before he dies, he's interested in leaving his fortune to the family of that woman's children. But he first wants to vet them to make sure they're worthy of his money.  So he goes undercover as John Smith and manages to live with the family as a boarder. They seem like a nice enough bunch, but with two kids in college, a mortgage to pay, as well as drugstore business to run, they're broke. The $8 a week he's going to pay them as a boarder will go a long way...  Meanwhile, Samuel becomes closer to the family, and he decides to give them, anonymously, $100,000 -- just to see how they'll handle the money. Harriet (Lynn Bari), the mother, goes nuts. But everyone else in the family just goes along with it? They sell the drugstore, sell the house, buy a mansion, and somehow make $100,000 feel like a billion dollars... and everyone in town believes, rig...